amusement. A little knowledge can be dangerous and annoying . . . but I
had actually learned some useful things. I'd been working in the city
weekends while at school, I could work a station without embarrassing
myself, and I was enthusiastic about my new, if modest, skills. I was
determined to outwork, outlast and in every way impress my old
tormentors at Mario's.
Dimitri, the pasta man, was years older than I was. Then in his early
thirties, running to fat, with chunky-framed glasses and a well-tended
handlebar moustache, he was markedly different from his fellow cooks
at Mario's. Born in the USA of a Russian father and a German mother, he
was the only other cook in P-town who'd been to cooking school—in his
case, a hotel school in Switzerland. Though he claimed to have been
expelled for demonstrating the Twist in that institution's dining hall, I
always doubted this version of events. He became the second great
influence in my career.
A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand,
Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler,
philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as
well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated
phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York
Times crossword puzzle—to which he was hopelessly addicted.
It was from Dimitri's fertile mind that much of what I'd come to know as
Mariospeak had originated. Brainy, paranoid, famously prone to sulking,
he both amused and appalled his co-workers with his many
misadventures, his affected mannerisms and his tendency to encounter
tragicomic disaster. Fond of hyperbole and dramatic over-statement,
Dimitri had distinguished himself after a particularly unpleasant breakup
with a girlfriend by shaving his head completely bald. This would have
been, in itself, a rather bold statement of self-loathing and grief, but
Dimitri pushed matters to the extreme; the story went that he had no
sooner revealed his snow-white skull to the world than he went to the